Playwright: Moisés Kaufman. At: Promethean Theatre Ensemble at Edgewater Presbyterian Church, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr Ave. Tickets: 800-838-3006 or PrometheanTheatre.org; $15-$25. Runs through: Dec. 18
Promethean Theatre Ensemble is making much of the fact that gender-blind casting has been applied to director Brian Pastor's new production of Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde. The drama originally debuted off-Broadway in 1997 with an all-male cast.
But rather than being alternately awed or angered, most audiences will probably just give a shoulder shrug to Promethean's unconventional casting choices.
Yes, women have been cast in the central roles of the famed martyred title artist ( Jamie Bragg ), his much-younger lover Lord Alfred Douglas ( Heather Smith ) and the wily attorney Edward Carson ( Cameron Feagin ) who trips up Wilde on the witness stand. Other women additionally play small male roles, while one female role is taken on by a man ( Steve Lords as an over-the-top indignant Queen Victoria ).
So Promethean Theatre can be applauded for giving more opportunities to women to play roles usually denied them. But ultimately the gender switching doesn't make much of an impact dramatically.
That's due to gay playwright Moisés Kaufman's thoroughly researched and theatrical docudrama structure of the play which asks for an ensemble of actors to assume multiple roles while quoting from many sources like trial transcripts, unpublished texts and modern interviews. It's a similar technique that Kaufman later applied in collaboration with the Tectonic Theater Project to create the more widely produced 2000 docudrama The Laramie Project ( which looked into the aftermath of the 1998 murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard ).
Like so much theater where things do not need to be literal, audiences can easily forget that women are playing men's roles in Promethean's Gross Indecency. Yes, the sight of two women embracing may give audiences pause to briefly imagine this damaging and defining gay historical moment recast as a Victorian scandal of lesbian love, but the gender pronouns stay true to Kaufman's original text.
And it's the strength of Kaufman's text that ultimately supports the production's many strong performances. And that's despite some shakier aspects to Pastor's production.
The cast was oddly directed to emote phony awe at entering the stagestrange since Jeremiah Barr's spare set design isn't that much to write home about. Uriel Gomez's costumes are also a bit of a mishmash, with some intending to be period-accurate while other heavily safety-pinned duds donned by the likes of Smith as Lord Alfred or Ross Frawley as the angrily obsessed Queensberry come off as wannabe steampunk.
But all this grousing is ultimately inconsequential. It's great to have Gross Indecency back on a Chicago stage as a reminder of how these three trials personally ruined Oscar Wilde and helped ( for better or for worse ) to shine a spotlight on homosexuality and how society reacted to it for generations.